We have a national eating disorder. Perhaps this is because we’re inundated with mixed messages about nutrition, and we’ve lost all connection to traditional food culture. Here’s the only compass you need:

1. Eat Real Food
2. Avoid Fake Food
3. Listen to what your body is telling you it needs. If it says it needs pizza or candy, that’s a drug craving. If it’s telling you it needs fruit/mashed potatoes/red meat/salad/chicken skin/egg yolk/etc., then that is probably a genuine need; full speed ahead.

The mindbodygreen Podcast

Health all-stars Melissa Hartwig Urban, Rich Roll, Dr. Molly Maloof and I sat down at this year’s mbgRevitalize with their founder + co-CEO, Jason Wachob to debate this topic. Tune into the mbg Podcast to dive deeper into this dialogue on when psychedelics expand consciousness—and when they do more harm than good.

Listen to the podcast

We get so focused on which probiotic to take, whether to take a prebiotic, which herbal antimicrobials to use to treat your SIBO, that we sometimes forget the most important medicine for healing your gut is REST. And the thing that probably damages gut health the most is CHRONIC STRESS.

Need to be convinced by science? When you’re in fight or flight mode, your digestion is compromised. This is your body’s way of triaging– move the blood away from the gut toward your muscles so you can more effectively run from the tiger. Your digestion will resume once you make it to safety. Great, except these days we’re running from the tiger 24/7. Our digestion never properly comes back online.

Meanwhile, the relaxation state of your nervous system is when your digestion is flowing. Relaxation is also when your body does housekeeping and heals injuries, like a damaged gut. Even if you just take 2 minutes to do a breathing exercise right now instead of scrolling Instagram, that would give your gut a 2-minute window to do some healing. Try it out!

Originally published in Well + Good

There is a direct and powerful relationship between stress and gut health. Stress compromises the health of our digestive tract in a variety of ways.

Learn the gut-health bonuses of staying stress-free.

Read more

My patients frequently report they can’t tolerate gluten in America, but when they’re in Europe, they eat it and feel fine. I have the same experience. A lot of people hear this and say, ‘oh it’s just because you’re relaxed while you’re on vacation in Italy, so that’s why you tolerate pasta there.’ Okay, fair enough, except I put this theory to the test in my own life.

Last year my family traveled for 7 months around the world. I don’t tolerate a drop of gluten in America, but while I was in Italy, Greece, Israel, Hong Kong, Australia and New Zealand, I ate ALL THE GLUTEN. And I’ve never felt better. Clear skin, calm belly, great energy, stable mood. Then we flew to Kauai. I was still 100% in the same state of relaxation and vacation mode as I was on the rest of the trip. Arguably, I was even more relaxed because I was in PARADISE, and yet one bite of the gluten on American soil sent my body straight back to all my old gluten-intolerance symptoms.

There is something about American gluten that is deranged. The next theory is that it’s the glyphosate (the active ingredient in the pesticide Roundup that we use on our wheat crop more than any other place in the world). I’m all for pointing to glyphosate as the root of all evil, but I’ve tested out this hypothesis in my own body too. Even when I eat organic long-fermented sourdough from the farmers market (100% glyphosate-free) in the US, I still get symptomatic. I will tolerate that less than a gas station croissant in Italy.

So what gives? Some theories I have are that the yeast in the air plays a role, or perhaps it’s actually the tap water used to make the bread. Even my organic farmers market sourdough was made with American municipal tap water, which contains glyphosate residue. Let me know if you have your own theories for why so many of us can’t handle American gluten but we can tolerate it abroad.

I was recently on the Do The Thing podcast with the amazing Melissa Hartwig Urban discussing diet and lifestyle approaches to treating depression. Melissa got a comment about shaming people for taking meds. Here are my thoughts on the matter:

This is such an important, delicate, nuanced issue. I of course would never shame anybody for anything, let alone for taking a medication as an act to take care of themselves and treat their mental illness. But I 100% get how someone could “hear” shaming when I say the key to treating depression is not just about serotonin and taking medication. In the act of offering people a different way of looking at depression, and additional tools beyond medication, it can be heard as a judgment of the approach of taking medications. It’s not. I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with taking psych meds. My concerns are: a) medications don’t actually help everybody; b) many people experience side effects such as decreased libido, digestive issues, weight gain, or even a blunting of affect when on meds, and those effects need to be balanced with the benefits, c) meds are not as efficacious as we’re lead to believe; and d) we have a lack of informed consent around the fact that medications can be difficult to get off of, so that information should be part of the conversation when we’re starting meds. It’s important to point out, if someone is on meds and it’s working for them and helping with their depression, that’s great news! No need to do anything differently. My concern is for the millions of people for whom our conventional mental health treatments aren’t meeting their needs. For those folks out there, I want to offer you other tools and approaches for addressing your illness and empowering you to feel well in your lives.